Pixels

• A pixel is a contraction of the term PIcture ELement
• Digital images are made up of tiny squares simular to a mosaic
• Each pixel in the image has a numerical value of between 0 and 255 and is made up of three color channels. So for example a pixel could be 37-red, 76-green and 125-blue
• There are over 16 million possible combinations using this scheme and each one represents a different color.
• One of the main ways that manufacturers categorize their digital cameras is in terms of pixel count. What this is is the number of individual pixels that go into making each image.
• Today this number varies between 1 million (1 Megapixel) to around 14 million (14 Megapixels).
• A million pixels is abbreviated to MP, so a 1MP camera has 1 million pixels and a 3MP camera has 3 million pixels.